4 ms·

I appreciate the message of this article. I've played with half a dozen types of home NAS / RAID / storage solutions over the decades. The best way I can descr

I appreciate the message of this article. I've played with half a dozen types of home NAS / RAID / storage solutions over the decades. The best way I can describe it is: There are people who just want to use a car to get from A to B; there are those who enjoy the act of driving, maybe take it to the track on a lapping day; and there are those who enjoy having a shell of a car in the garage and working on it. There's of course a definite overlap and Venn diagram :-). My approach / suggestion - Understand what type are you in relation to any given technology vs what is the author's perspective. I will never resent the time (oh God so much time!) I've spent in the past mucking with homelabs and storage systems. Good memories and tons of learning! today I have family and kids and just need my storage to work. I'm in a different Venn circle than the author - sure I have knowledge and experience and could conceivably save a few bucks (eh not as given as articles make it seem;), as long as I value my time appropriately low and don't mind the necessary upkeep and potential scheduled and unscheduled "maintenance windows" to my non-techie users. But I must admit I'm in the turn-key solution phase of my life and have cheerfully enjoyed a big-name NAS over last 5 years or so :). The trick with old computers harnessed as NAS is the often increased space, power, and setup/patching/maintenance work requirements, compared to hopefully some learning experience and a sense of control.

kotaKat 11mo ago
> My approach / suggestion - Understand what type are you in relation to any given technology vs what is the author's perspective. Similarly what I was once told when looking at private planes was "What's your mission?" and they've stuck with me ever since, even if I'm never gonna buy a plane. One person's mission might be backing up their family photos while someone else's mission is a full *arr stack.
embedding-shape 11mo ago
> But I must admit I'm in the turn-key solution phase of my life and have cheerfully enjoyed a big-name NAS over last 5 years or so :). You know, I thought I was too, so I threw in the towel and migrated one my NAS to TrueNAS, since it's supposed to be one of those "turn-key solutions that doesn't require maintenance", and everything got slower, harder to maintain and even managed to somehow screw up one of my old disks when I added it to my pool. The next step after that was to migrate to NixOS and bit the bullet to ensure the stuff actually works. I'd love to just give someone money and not having to care, but it seems the motto of "If you want something done correctly, you have to do it yourself" lives deep in me, and I just cannot stomach loosing the data on my NAS, so it ends up really hard to trust any of those paid-for solutions when they're so crap.
- tylerflick 11mo ago
  Are people doing more than serving SMB shares with their NAS’s? I feel like I’m missing out on something.
  - Uvix 11mo ago
    I'm hosting a couple of apps in Docker on mine. (Pihole, Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, and Bitwarden.)
  - hengheng 11mo ago
    Depending on how you build it, you could run homeassistant next to your smb, which lends itself to all sorts of add-ons such as calibre-web for displaying eBooks and synchronizing progress. Of course, gitea and surroundings, or similar ci/cd can be a fun thing to dabble with if you aren't totally over that from work. Another fun idea is to run the rapidly developing immich as a photo storage solution. But in general, the best inspiration is the awesome-selfhosted list.
  - spiffytech 11mo ago
    People want all kinds of things besides literal SMB shares: - Other network protocols (NFS, ftp, sftp, S3) - Apps that need bulk storage (e.g., Plex, Immich) - Syncthing node - SSH support (for some backup tools, for rsync, etc) - You're already running a tiny Linux box in your home, so maybe also Pihole / VPN server / host your blog? You've got compute attached to storage, and people find lots of ways to use that. Synology even has an app store.
  - SubiculumCode 11mo ago
    I personally don't get what they are serving with a home NAS? Movies/Music/Family Photos is all I can think of, personally...and those don't seem that compelling to me compared to cloud.
    - Uvix 11mo ago
      Also ebooks and software installers, but those and movies/music are my main categories. Cloud costs would be... exorbitant. 19 TB and I'm nowhere near done ripping my movies. Dropbox would be $96/month, Backblaze $114/month, and OneDrive won't let me buy that much capacity.
master_crab 11mo ago
Another way to put it - My home lab has production and non-production environments. Non-production is my kubernetes cluster running all the various websites, AI workflows, and other cool tools i love playing with. Production is everything in between my wife typing in google.com and google; or between my kids and their favorite shows on Jellyfin. You can guess which one has the managed solutions, and which one has my admittedly-reliable-but-still-requires-technical-expertise-to-fix-when-down unmanaged solutions.
pessimizer 11mo ago
I'm an not the relentless explorer and experimenter that you're sort of patronizing with this comment. I'm somebody who knows that you can put together a NAS with an old desktop somebody will give you for free, slap Debian Stable on it, RAID5 (4 or fewer) or RAID6 (5 or a few more) a bunch of drives together, and throw a samba share on the network in less than a day (minus drive clearing time for encryption.) It is not some sort of learning and growing experience. The entirety of the maintenance on the first one I put together somewhere between 10-15 years ago is to apt-get update and dist-upgrade on it periodically, upgrade the OS to the latest stable whenever I get around to it, and when I log in and get a message that a disk is failing or failed, shut it down until I can buy a replacement. This happens once every 4 or 5 years. The trick with big-name NAS is that they go out of business, change their terms, or install spyware on your computer and you end up involved in tons of drama over your own data. This guide is even a bit overblown. Just use MDADM.* It will always be there, it will always work, you can switch OSes or move the drives to another system and the new one will instantly understand your drives - they really become independent of the computer altogether. When it comes to encryption, all of the above goes for LUKS through cryptsetup. The box is really just a dumb box that serves shares, it's the drives that are smart. I guess MDADM is a (short) learning experience, but it's not one that expires. LUKS through cryptsetup is also very little to learn (remember to write zeros to the drive after encrypting it), but it's something that turnkey solutions are likely to ignore, screw up, or lock you into something proprietary through. Instead of getting a big SSD for a boot drive, just use one of those tiny PCIe cards, as small and cheap as you can get it. If it dies, just buy another one, slap it in, install Debian, and you'll be running again in an hour. With all this I'm not talking about a "homelab" or any sort of social club, just a computer that serves storage. The choice isn't between making it into a lifestyle/personality or subscribing to the managed experience. Somehow people always seem to make it into that. tl;dr: use any old desktop, just use Debian Stable, MDADM, and cryptsetup. Put the OS on a 64G PCIe or even a thumb drive (whatever you have laying around.) * Please don't use ZFS, you don't need it and you don't understand it (if you do, ignore me), if somebody tells you your NAS needs 64G of RAM they are insane. All it's going to do is turn you into somebody who says that putting together a NAS is too hard and too expensive.
- QuiEgo 11mo ago
bane 11mo ago
I personally think big-box computer retailers that build custom turn-key computers (e.g. Microcenter) should get into the NAS game by partnering with unraid and Fractal. It's as turnkey as any commercial NAS I've ever used but comes with way more flexibility and future proofing and the ability for users to get hyper technical if they want and tweak everything in the system. It's wild how much more cost effective this would be than pretty much any commercial NAS offering. It's ridiculous when you consider total system lifecycle cost (with how easy it is to upgrade unraid storage pools). Looking right now and my local Microcenter builds essentially three things: desktop PCs, some kind of "studio" PC, and "Racing Simulators". Turnkey NASs would move a lot of inventory I'd wager.
- QuiEgo 11mo ago
  I think the Terramaster NASes are about as close to this as you can get, they even have an internal USB header that seems purpose-added for the Unraid boot disk. That said, I prefer straight Debain to Unraid. I feel Unraid saves you a weekend on the command line setting it up the first time (nothing wrong with that!), but after playing with the trial I just went back to Debian, I didn't feel like there was $250 of value there for me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Almost everything on my server is in Linuxserver.io Docker containers anyways, and I greatly prefer just writing a Docker Compose file over clicking through a ton of GUI drop downs. Once you're playing with anything beyond SMB shares, you're likely either technically savvy or blindly following a guide anyways, so running commands through ssh is actually easier to follow along with a guide than clicking in a UI, since you can just copy and paste. YMMV.
  - bane 11mo ago
    You have good points! For me, eliminating the few hours dealing with some stupid config option I messed up is easily worth $250, which unraid basically makes go away. But yeah, most of the things the system does are really just some basic linux distro with various bits installed. The terramaster NAS's are surprisingly reasonable for pre-built NASs. And I think they'd be fine if you want an <4 bay NAS solution. There's a few tiers I think of home NAS users: 0 - add an external hard drive to my base machine, maybe share it (or the content) to other users on the network 1 - put the drive on the network, there's a bunch of OEM "drive on your network" options there 2 - the 3-5 bay home NAS user. Used to be a medium user, but now can easily hit ~100TB. 3 - the greater than 6 bay home NAS user. At some point, I moved from #2 to #3 and decided that I had enough spare drives lying around that it was worth it to invest in a big case and centralize everything in one box. It's around this time that I think the cost efficiency of the NAS hardware really left me behind. A 6-bay terramaster is around $500 and provides an N95 and 8GB of memory. So basically in rPi5 territory. A 12-bay terramaster is like $1800 is with an i7-1255U and 16GB of memory. I built a 16+ bay unraid system this year for around $1500 that included an i9-12900k and 128GB of memory + an unraid lifetime license. I know I'm a #3 NAS user, but the different in price is a bit, for less capable equipment. You could build the same system, and save about $400 if you put it together and just put some linux distro on it. I guess that point I was making originally still stands, I think these retailers could build really nice NAS options on a big price undercut. At volume I bet they could negotiate moving unraid licenses for much cheaper as an OEM option. Note: Yes! I acknowledge none of these choices really include the actual drives, any of these options might allow for a gradual in-fill and replacement of drives over time.
jmspring 11mo ago
I think there is a slight modification to this, at least for me, there are things tech related for me I want turnkey - I've used MacOS for years because I want a unix system with a decent GUI that I don't have to manage (the fact that the machines work well is a nice addon). I've got a synology, it works. I don't have unlimited bandwidth or time and want to continue the tinkering phase on things that interest me rather than the tools that enable such.

kotaKat 11mo ago

> My approach / suggestion - Understand what type are you in relation to any given technology vs what is the author's perspective. Similarly what I was once told when looking at private planes was "What's your mission?" and they've stuck with me ever since, even if I'm never gonna buy a plane. One person's mission might be backing up their family photos while someone else's mission is a full *arr stack.

embedding-shape 11mo ago

> But I must admit I'm in the turn-key solution phase of my life and have cheerfully enjoyed a big-name NAS over last 5 years or so :). You know, I thought I was too, so I threw in the towel and migrated one my NAS to TrueNAS, since it's supposed to be one of those "turn-key solutions that doesn't require maintenance", and everything got slower, harder to maintain and even managed to somehow screw up one of my old disks when I added it to my pool. The next step after that was to migrate to NixOS and bit the bullet to ensure the stuff actually works. I'd love to just give someone money and not having to care, but it seems the motto of "If you want something done correctly, you have to do it yourself" lives deep in me, and I just cannot stomach loosing the data on my NAS, so it ends up really hard to trust any of those paid-for solutions when they're so crap.

tylerflick 11mo ago
Are people doing more than serving SMB shares with their NAS’s? I feel like I’m missing out on something.
- Uvix 11mo ago
  I'm hosting a couple of apps in Docker on mine. (Pihole, Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, and Bitwarden.)
- hengheng 11mo ago
  Depending on how you build it, you could run homeassistant next to your smb, which lends itself to all sorts of add-ons such as calibre-web for displaying eBooks and synchronizing progress. Of course, gitea and surroundings, or similar ci/cd can be a fun thing to dabble with if you aren't totally over that from work. Another fun idea is to run the rapidly developing immich as a photo storage solution. But in general, the best inspiration is the awesome-selfhosted list.
- spiffytech 11mo ago
  People want all kinds of things besides literal SMB shares: - Other network protocols (NFS, ftp, sftp, S3) - Apps that need bulk storage (e.g., Plex, Immich) - Syncthing node - SSH support (for some backup tools, for rsync, etc) - You're already running a tiny Linux box in your home, so maybe also Pihole / VPN server / host your blog? You've got compute attached to storage, and people find lots of ways to use that. Synology even has an app store.
- SubiculumCode 11mo ago
  I personally don't get what they are serving with a home NAS? Movies/Music/Family Photos is all I can think of, personally...and those don't seem that compelling to me compared to cloud.
  - Uvix 11mo ago
    Also ebooks and software installers, but those and movies/music are my main categories. Cloud costs would be... exorbitant. 19 TB and I'm nowhere near done ripping my movies. Dropbox would be $96/month, Backblaze $114/month, and OneDrive won't let me buy that much capacity.

master_crab 11mo ago

Another way to put it - My home lab has production and non-production environments. Non-production is my kubernetes cluster running all the various websites, AI workflows, and other cool tools i love playing with. Production is everything in between my wife typing in google.com and google; or between my kids and their favorite shows on Jellyfin. You can guess which one has the managed solutions, and which one has my admittedly-reliable-but-still-requires-technical-expertise-to-fix-when-down unmanaged solutions.

pessimizer 11mo ago

I'm an not the relentless explorer and experimenter that you're sort of patronizing with this comment. I'm somebody who knows that you can put together a NAS with an old desktop somebody will give you for free, slap Debian Stable on it, RAID5 (4 or fewer) or RAID6 (5 or a few more) a bunch of drives together, and throw a samba share on the network in less than a day (minus drive clearing time for encryption.) It is not some sort of learning and growing experience. The entirety of the maintenance on the first one I put together somewhere between 10-15 years ago is to apt-get update and dist-upgrade on it periodically, upgrade the OS to the latest stable whenever I get around to it, and when I log in and get a message that a disk is failing or failed, shut it down until I can buy a replacement. This happens once every 4 or 5 years. The trick with big-name NAS is that they go out of business, change their terms, or install spyware on your computer and you end up involved in tons of drama over your own data. This guide is even a bit overblown. Just use MDADM.* It will always be there, it will always work, you can switch OSes or move the drives to another system and the new one will instantly understand your drives - they really become independent of the computer altogether. When it comes to encryption, all of the above goes for LUKS through cryptsetup. The box is really just a dumb box that serves shares, it's the drives that are smart. I guess MDADM is a (short) learning experience, but it's not one that expires. LUKS through cryptsetup is also very little to learn (remember to write zeros to the drive after encrypting it), but it's something that turnkey solutions are likely to ignore, screw up, or lock you into something proprietary through. Instead of getting a big SSD for a boot drive, just use one of those tiny PCIe cards, as small and cheap as you can get it. If it dies, just buy another one, slap it in, install Debian, and you'll be running again in an hour. With all this I'm not talking about a "homelab" or any sort of social club, just a computer that serves storage. The choice isn't between making it into a lifestyle/personality or subscribing to the managed experience. Somehow people always seem to make it into that. tl;dr: use any old desktop, just use Debian Stable, MDADM, and cryptsetup. Put the OS on a 64G PCIe or even a thumb drive (whatever you have laying around.) * Please don't use ZFS, you don't need it and you don't understand it (if you do, ignore me), if somebody tells you your NAS needs 64G of RAM they are insane. All it's going to do is turn you into somebody who says that putting together a NAS is too hard and too expensive.

QuiEgo 11mo ago

bane 11mo ago

I personally think big-box computer retailers that build custom turn-key computers (e.g. Microcenter) should get into the NAS game by partnering with unraid and Fractal. It's as turnkey as any commercial NAS I've ever used but comes with way more flexibility and future proofing and the ability for users to get hyper technical if they want and tweak everything in the system. It's wild how much more cost effective this would be than pretty much any commercial NAS offering. It's ridiculous when you consider total system lifecycle cost (with how easy it is to upgrade unraid storage pools). Looking right now and my local Microcenter builds essentially three things: desktop PCs, some kind of "studio" PC, and "Racing Simulators". Turnkey NASs would move a lot of inventory I'd wager.

QuiEgo 11mo ago
I think the Terramaster NASes are about as close to this as you can get, they even have an internal USB header that seems purpose-added for the Unraid boot disk. That said, I prefer straight Debain to Unraid. I feel Unraid saves you a weekend on the command line setting it up the first time (nothing wrong with that!), but after playing with the trial I just went back to Debian, I didn't feel like there was $250 of value there for me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Almost everything on my server is in Linuxserver.io Docker containers anyways, and I greatly prefer just writing a Docker Compose file over clicking through a ton of GUI drop downs. Once you're playing with anything beyond SMB shares, you're likely either technically savvy or blindly following a guide anyways, so running commands through ssh is actually easier to follow along with a guide than clicking in a UI, since you can just copy and paste. YMMV.
- bane 11mo ago
  You have good points! For me, eliminating the few hours dealing with some stupid config option I messed up is easily worth $250, which unraid basically makes go away. But yeah, most of the things the system does are really just some basic linux distro with various bits installed. The terramaster NAS's are surprisingly reasonable for pre-built NASs. And I think they'd be fine if you want an <4 bay NAS solution. There's a few tiers I think of home NAS users: 0 - add an external hard drive to my base machine, maybe share it (or the content) to other users on the network 1 - put the drive on the network, there's a bunch of OEM "drive on your network" options there 2 - the 3-5 bay home NAS user. Used to be a medium user, but now can easily hit ~100TB. 3 - the greater than 6 bay home NAS user. At some point, I moved from #2 to #3 and decided that I had enough spare drives lying around that it was worth it to invest in a big case and centralize everything in one box. It's around this time that I think the cost efficiency of the NAS hardware really left me behind. A 6-bay terramaster is around $500 and provides an N95 and 8GB of memory. So basically in rPi5 territory. A 12-bay terramaster is like $1800 is with an i7-1255U and 16GB of memory. I built a 16+ bay unraid system this year for around $1500 that included an i9-12900k and 128GB of memory + an unraid lifetime license. I know I'm a #3 NAS user, but the different in price is a bit, for less capable equipment. You could build the same system, and save about $400 if you put it together and just put some linux distro on it. I guess that point I was making originally still stands, I think these retailers could build really nice NAS options on a big price undercut. At volume I bet they could negotiate moving unraid licenses for much cheaper as an OEM option. Note: Yes! I acknowledge none of these choices really include the actual drives, any of these options might allow for a gradual in-fill and replacement of drives over time.

jmspring 11mo ago

I think there is a slight modification to this, at least for me, there are things tech related for me I want turnkey - I've used MacOS for years because I want a unix system with a decent GUI that I don't have to manage (the fact that the machines work well is a nice addon). I've got a synology, it works. I don't have unlimited bandwidth or time and want to continue the tinkering phase on things that interest me rather than the tools that enable such.